John M. Templeton– contrarian?

by Greg Mayer

Just what the world needs: a hagiographic film on John M. Templeton! According to Neil Genzlinger of the New York Times, there’s a new film about Templeton, Contrarian; it will be shown in the US tonight (Saturday, Dec. 28) at 9 PM eastern time on Bloomberg TV (it aired the past two nights as well). Templeton, of course, was the very wealthy investor who spent a lot of his money on a quixotic quest to answer “big questions”, which mostly devolved into an attempt to promote “discoveries” in religion, and to mix-up science with theology. The film appears to be “authorized”, with several family members participating, and his foundation’s logo accompanying the publicity materials.

The title seems rather odd. While a lot of money is lost on Wall Street, a lot of money is also made there, so Templeton does not stand out because he got rich. Is it because of how he got rich? Well, everyone who beats the average market performance did something different from most other investors, so that hardly qualifies. Spending a lot of money supporting his religion and advocating “free enterprise” is utterly conventional for rich men. As a Presbyterian, his religion is also completely mainstream.

The most distinctive and contrarian thing about Templeton is not mentioned in any of the publicity materials (website, trailer) that I’ve seen: that he renounced his American citizenship in order to avoid paying taxes. Templeton moved to the Bahamas, and obtained UK citizenship as well, so that he could avoid paying taxes to the US. In the trailer, it is said that he was, “very conscious of not wasting a dollar”, so I suppose Templeton thought taxes were a waste (taking a rather different view of the matter than did Oliver Wendell Holmes).

Not only do the filmmakers and the promoters leave this fact out, the promotional materials are rich with bucolic scenes of the American heartland, emphasize his rural upbringing, and they’ve even named their website “tennesseecontrarian.com”– a rather astonishing point of emphasis about a man who renounced his citizenship! (And we’re of course not talking about an immigrant who leaves his homeland seeking opportunity or liberty– he had both, but thought he could better his rate of return.)

It’s interesting that the film is being shown on Bloomberg TV, owned (mostly) by New York’s soon to be ex-mayor, Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, like Templeton, bought a residence in a tax haven, but because of his political ambitions, Bloomberg could never have renounced his US citizenship as Templeton did.

35 Comments

There are few reasons to leave this country if born into it as a citizen…renouncing one’s citizenship for tax purposes is not one of them. It is a very selfish thing to do, and if possible, I think less of Templeton and his retinue of apologists who plead for respect yet deserve the opposite.

It’s more complicated if you live outside the US though I know plenty of Canadians with dual US citizenship living in Canada.

This according to Wikipedia:

The U.S. citizen may lose his dual citizenship by obtaining naturalization in a foreign state, taking an oath or making an affirmation or other formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state or political subdivision thereof, or serving in the armed forces of a foreign state if this action was performed with the intention of renouncing U.S. citizenship.

Whereas UK nationals only have to declare overseas income if they are domiciled in the UK. The rules that established whether someone is domiciled in the UK for tax purposes are complex, but basically is depends on how much time you spend in the UK in any tax year.

Templeton, who used to be a favorite nn PBS’s Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser made much of being a contrarian investor (picking stocks or sectors that weren’t in vogue). As for his views on paying taxes, well, he was very much like many of his fellow members of the super-rich financial parasite class.

On his obituary at bloomberg.com it says Templeton “never flew first class and lived year-round in his peaceful ocean-side home in the Bahamas.” Does that mean he always flew privately or if he lived “year-round” in the Bahamas he never travelled so would not fly anyway?

If he renounced his citizenship to avoid paying taxes, he would have had to pay a very hefty exit fee to be allowed to do it. In all other countries in the world except one, tax is based on residence not citizenship. The only other country with citizenship-based tax is Eritrea!

Why is Templeton supposed to be considered and loved as an example of a “contrarian?” The question seems to be answered in the article and it’s what I suspected: another example of the privileged status automatically granted to religion and/or spirituality:

The film …doesn’t go too deeply into Templeton’s business career, instead reserving the final part for his interest in spiritual matters and in exploring how science, religion and other disciplines that are often at odds might join to answer profound questions.
He established the Templeton Prize to promote this exploration, partly, the film says, because the Nobel Prizes ignore it. These days, when finance barons are more often in the news for the most unspiritual of pursuits, it’s a legacy that seems all the more singular.

Get it? Ooooh, Templeton was being so brave! So dangerous! He was putting money into religion! He was being spiritual!

Because the boring, traditional, normal, common, inside-the-box everywhere assumption is that there is no God, there are no Higher Mental-type Powers, Forces, or realms, and materialistic naturalistic atheism is true.

Now you see. Templeton is a maverick, not afraid to go against the tide and fight the Atheist Establishment! And he puts MONEY in it! Which virtually nobody else on the planet does!

Being ‘spiritual’ is the underdog, the unpopular but wise and thoughtful alternative to the default. Thus runs the story, and thus the religious privilege. They get the status of being “daring” while firmly following the status quo, the position held by almost everyone almost everywhere throughout human history. It’s the same damn thing as Christians framing themselves as persecuted and powerless while simultaneously claiming the culture. You get a narrative where you’re an unconventional hero AND you are constantly surrounded by reassurance from the majority. What a neat trick.

Templeton and his Foundation are not “contrarian” because they’re not putting anything on the line. People have been trying to shove science and spirituality together as long as they’ve been trying to shove reality and religion and the natural and the supernatural together — and they’ve gotten very, very good at it. The Templeton Foundation is as likely to discover that a spiritual hypothesis is wrong as NCCAM is likely to find out that alternative medicines don’t work.

The only surprise is going to be how they manage to spin all results as irrelevant, positive, or “suggestive of intriguing possibilities.”

Yes, they find it out without actually finding anything out — that is, coming out and saying “X does not work.” No, it just always “needs more research.” If they won’t even throw out homeopathy and energy healing, they have no real standards. They’re only pretending to investigate.

Bottom line, the Templeton Foundation would not, could not negate any spiritual claim. I think the most they can do is argue that while some people believe that spiritual claim X works like this, it seems to work in another way.

Dawkins once parodied this strategy by imagining physicists insisting that our understanding of the ether has been “clarified.” Or, from the other direction, biologists discovering that DNA is not in double-helix form and suddenly insisting that they never took the idea literally: instead the double-helix metaphor truthfully “speaks to us” and this is what they meant.

Incidentally, this is why “empiricism” is not a good philosophy of science and technology; one needs the rationalist component to rule out in advance the more implausible nonsense, if only to save the money needed to investigate it.

There seems to be a mythology in this country that country folks are the salt of the earth. In my view, they were the ones going to Church on Sunday and lynching black folks on Sunday night, and would have continued to do that if the city folk hadn’t made them stop. Cities are where enlightened attitudes are birthed.

I suspect this mythology permeates many Western countries and dates all the way back to Roman attitudes during the Republic where good citizens (often portrayed as bucolic ideals) would happily plough their fields, but when duty called, would take up arms, do their part in defending Rome then happily return to the fields. The only difference is in modern times, we identify this with the common man vs. ancient times who centred stories about virtue around aristocrats.

Your city, Cincinnati is named after a famous Roman who did just this, Cincinnatus and was revered for his ability to give up power willingly and go back to his fields.

The most ‘contrarian’ thing about Templeton is that he rejected science, evolutionary theory in particular.
So he was ‘contrarian’ together with 40%+ of the USA population there. Note, I think in my country, South Africa, about 90% would be ‘ccntrarian’ in that sense.
Maybe we live in a ‘contrarian’ world?

Most interesting. Clearly, Templeton wanted a place in history beside Alfred Nobel. Without the above, it could be noted that Nobel’s fortune was based on his 355 patents vs. Templeton’s, um, how many were there exactly?

Now we can further add the comparison of lifelong Swedish citizen never accused of skattefusk vs. the citizenship-switching, tax-scheming Templeton. Enjoy your place in history, John.

As Warren Buffett put it, Templeton’s (and his own) Master of the Universe status derived from being a person “who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions.” My heroes.

I don’t have a problem calling John Templeton a contrarian (he was one, at least when investing). I don’t mind his having changed citizenship to pay less taxes (or anything else people do to legally pay as little tax as possible).

What baffles me again and again is how someone who is very objective and rational in one field can be so irrational in another.

Templeton was a very good investor because he could look dispassionately and objectively at a security to determine its value. Doing that requires an extraordinary capacity for independent thought. Yet, religious faith requires the opposite of independent thought.

His is just another name in the long list of people who are very rational in some fields, and also religious believers. Although we all know many people in that list, including prominent scientists, it still surprises me when I find new examples.

P.S. Check out rule #12 in John Templeton’s rules of investing: “Begin with a prayer. If you begin with a prayer, you can think more clearly and make fewer mistakes”.

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